For musician Davide Cabassi, piano is his life

Wednesday

Oct 31, 2007 at 12:01 AMOct 31, 2007 at 8:40 PM

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Nick Rogers

Pianist Davide Cabassi debuted alongside an orchestra when he was only 13. He still remembers the explosive emotions he had as a person designated to enforce the power in a piece of music.
He also recalls … well, just how young he really was.
“It was a very big orchestra with a lot of old people and a very old Russian guy conducting,” Cabassi, now 31, says of performing a Dmitri Shostakovich piano concerto with the RAI Symphony Orchestra in Milan.
That performance was the start of a storied career for Cabassi, who’s visited China, Russia, Switzerland and much of the United States. Even if piano hadn’t become his life’s work, he would’ve dedicated himself to it anyway.
“When you do something all your life, you’re just trained to do it, and you don’t ask yourself when it’s going to be a career because you’d just do it otherwise,” says Cabassi, who began learning notes at age 4 and playing piano at age 6. “I didn’t decide it was going to be my life. It was my life.”
Each guest artist at this season’s Masterworks concerts is a finalist, medal- or award-winner from the 12th annual Van Cliburn International Piano Competition from 2005.
The competition is so named after a pianist whose victory at a Russian piano competition in 1958 marked a new era in cultural relations. Held every four years, the Van Cliburn competition rewards its top finishers with guaranteed management, performances and CD-recording contracts.
Cabassi was a finalist at the most recent competition, documented in the PBS film “In the Heart of Music.” One of the more prominent competitors featured in the film, Cabassi says being incessantly followed by a camera crew had its perks and pains.
“It’s not something everyday to have TV crews with you, and they were very silent and not very invasive,” Cabassi says. “But, sometimes, of course, we wanted to send them somewhere very far away. We were all incredibly nervous, and the whole situation was difficult to manage.”
Cabassi calls the competition one of his most difficult but exhilarating experiences, and he approached each round as he would any performance — adhering to a piece’s text and context.
“(The text) is the bible for me, to find out what the composer wanted from that particular piece in that moment of his life and his career,” Cabassi says.
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On Saturday, Cabassi will perform Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. Written in 1785, it’s one of Mozart’s most popular works — with mostly sunny overtones, but also sweeping themes that have been used in films such as “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Superman Returns.”
Under the baton of conductor and music director Karen Lynne Deal, the orchestra also will perform the overture to Leonard Bernstein’s score for “West Side Story.” And, honoring the 50th anniversary of Jean Sibelius’ death, the concert concludes with his Symphony No. 1.
Cabassi calls the Mozart concerto one of the composer’s most technically demanding and aesthetically powerful pieces.
“Mozart’s music has such an incredible theatrical power, always like an opera, and incredibly beautiful,” Cabassi says. “It’s in C Major, which is a brilliant, beautiful key, and the second movement has one of the most incredible melodies written at the time.”
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Cabassi has a performance scheduled at the Louvre in Paris and several CDs in the works: “Pictures,” including Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” and works by Claude Debussy; a box set with concerti by Brahms and a concerto by Robert Schumann; and a series of recordings with the La Scala String Quartet.
But the biggest post-Van Cliburn boost to Cabassi’s life has had little to do with his playing.
“On the first tour I did, I went to meet a friend teaching in Kansas City, and I ended up marrying one of his students,” Cabassi says. “She’s the most beautiful, incredible wife possible.”
Nick Rogers can be reached at nick.rogers@sj-r.com. Read his blog, Unpainted Huffhines, at blogs.sj-r.com/unpaintedhuffhines.